Tenimyu

About

Tenimyu (Japanese: テニミュ) is an abbreviated name of Musical The Prince of Tennis (ミュージカル テニスの王子様, Musical Tennis no Ouji-sama)^[1], a musical franchise for the Japanese manga The Prince of Tennis by Takeshi Konomi.^[2] It also refers to a big misheard phrase/fake subtitle meme happened on the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND) in 2007.

Origin

The seed of this meme was a singing scene in "Musical The Prince of Tennis: Imperial Match Hyoutei in Summer"^[3], the 7th performance in this musical series played by the 2nd generation cast in August 2005 and released in DVD on November of that year. This scene is based on the manga's episode of Ryoma Echizen's game against Wakashi Hiyoshi in Kanto Tournament, which is included in chapter 154-157. Then, it came to get the first attention by a YouTube video which was submitted to NND in beta service on January 18th, 2007.^[4] This video, called "Aitsu Koso ga Tennis no Oujisama" (あいつこそがテニスの王子様, lit. "He Will Be The Prince of Tennis"), had been watched about 700,000 times in its first three weeks, and deleted by copyright infringement in the following month.

The Musical

Musical The Prince of Tennis, running since 2003, is a quite unique "sports manga" musical played by young male actors only. Supported by many female fans, it has grown to a very succeeded musical franchise that has drawn 1.7 million of spectators in the first decade. Even English wiki page for this show has been launched by fans in overseas.^[6]

This musical's another characteristic is its actor selection process which chooses casts by whether their looks fit to the original characters' image out of consideration of their actual acting carrier or skills. So, there are a few of strange moments in this show caused by young actors' impassioned but immature performances. However, it's the biggest enjoyment for fans to watch the growth of their favorite actors throughout the shows.

Spread

By the great help of NND's comment feature working as subtitles and decoration, funny misheard/fake phrases by users went quite well with actors' bad pronunciations/singing even if those were slightly unmatch. Led by those user comments, this video immediately became to one of the killer contents in that newborn video sharing service. Though copyright holders tried removing for several times, users have continued re-uploading since after NND's relaunching on March 6th 2007.^[7][8][9] As of March 2014, the fourth reincarnation of this video (shown below) had earned over 4.5 million views^[10], and the total view count of all of the reprints has reached over 6 million. The amount of related videos tagged under "Tenimyu" has reached over 4700 as well.^[11]

Tenimyu meme is also dubbed as "The First Great Three" (初代御三家) together with Let's Go! Onmyouji and Kishimen, and known as one of the most important memes that established NND's unique comment style in the earliest days of that video sharing service. In a reflection of the popularity, this song has been included in many Nico Nico medleys created in later years.

Notable Examples

Different from many other NND memes, Tenimyu is a simple meme to enjoy comments on the musical's original videos. It hasn't derived so many parody videos like MAD videos memes. Each videos are usually dubbed by nicknames coming from famous misheard phrases.

Search Interest

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos listed in this section. And you need to change "region" and "language" settings in the bottom of video pages to watch Japanese comments unless you set the Japanese to your browser's default language.